Can you be friends with an EX?

So during my personal sabbatical/quarantine/healing alone time i have been reconnecting with friends who i closed my heart to during this struggle with codependency. I started with the easy friends. The ones who always forgive me because they know my wounds and patterns. Next were those friends who I had major falling outs with and the repair was done but a fear wall of trust still existed. Work in progress. Now i have been contemplating the thing i always avoid with all costs. Can i be friends with an ex boyfriends?

I always thought i could because i have no problem being friends with ex lovers. I thought that made me the mature person; however i realize that there are no stakes to be friends with someone who loves me more than i love them. My ex boyfriend confessed to me that he had never been able to be friends with an x girlfriend. I remember the arrogant judgement i felt when he said this. I was very young by personal standards and this was my very first “Adult” relationship. It wasn’t until years later and numerous failed relationships that i had to accept that i have never been able to be friends with an ex. Why is that? The excuses i use are that they will get the wrong idea and think i want to marry them, or that i will get confused and think i made a mistake and should have stayed with them. The deeper excuses are that their new wife or girlfriend will feel uncomfortable and i don’t want to interfere; god forbid we admit that we knocked boots and played house.

It is an odd vulnerbilty that is based on nothing as I reach out to my first love. The illusion that i am the person that i was after we parted ways and that he will think i am still heartbroken. I deny it when we run into each other and he sincerely invites me for tea and a catch up but my inner child echos the words of my mother thinking that all relationships are sexual or desperate for sexual. It is quite sad to have voted him and others off the island when we shared such sacred parts of ourselves and no damage was done in our breakup. We mutually agreed yet still there is fear to trust that he, they are in my corner and had a genuine love for me as i do them.

Intimacy is a tricky thing when sex is involved and past wounds make it impossible to be with the things you love about a person without the tension of partnership. Luckily this man gets it and our souls communicate on an energetic level. You can’t live with a person for 2 years and not be forever connected. So I continue to contemplate if i can be friends with an ex…………………..time to meditate…